The desire for increased transmission data rates in today's wireless data communication systems has led some systems to a technique of sending data over multiple parallel sub-carriers simultaneously, each sub-carrier having its own dedicated carrier frequency. In such prior-art multi-sub-carrier systems, it has been the practice for a first transceiver to send an amount of data to a second transceiver, after which the second transceiver makes multiple signal quality estimates (SQEs) corresponding to the signal received on each of the multiple sub-carriers. The second transceiver then reports the multiple SQEs to the first transceiver, which then accordingly adjusts the data rate of a subsequent transmission to the maximum consistent with the reported SQEs.
The prior-art technique presents two problems. The first problem is that measuring the SQE on all sub-carriers simultaneously can consume more processing power than may be readily available in the second transceiver. The second problem is that feeding back the SQE results from the second transceiver to the first transceiver requires bandwidth on the reverse link. Bandwidth that is allocated to SQE data represents an undesirable overhead.
Thus, what is needed is a method and apparatus for maximizing the data rate of a wireless data communication system. Preferably, the method and apparatus will maximize the data rate without requiring the second transceiver to measure and communicate a signal quality estimate (SQE) for each of the plurality of sub-carriers.